[OSM-dev] Nestoria Tiles Write Up

[Nick Whitelegg]

>see my comments towards the end ;D

>The librsvg approach looks interesting, as ideally what is needed is a
>lightweight SVG to PNG converter (command line based and easily
>installable without a long dependency list). Does librsvg have many
>dependencies?

Just a few ideas - not all might be 100% feasible/sensible - but thinking 
out loud.

Apologies for following up my own post but I got an answer to this one... 
it does seem it has quite a long list of dependencies. In the absence of a 
server machine powerful enough to serve SVG to clients, and browsers which 
can render SVG nicely (the ideal solution) an automated, distributed 
rendering process sounds ideal. However participants ideally shouldn't 
need to download a lot of dependencies to run it. Maybe (and this needs 
more research) a Java solution (xalan/batik) would be better, as once you 
have the JRE installed it's easy to run Java stuff. Also it would be easy 
on both Linux and Windows. *However* I haven't experimented with batik so 
am not sure how good it is at rendering tiles. 

The other approach that could be taken is something of a departure and 
wouldn't go via SVG at all. Some GUI toolkits (e.g. qt) apparently do nice 
rendering. Even the JOSM mappaint rendering with a few tweaks could 
perhaps be good enough. So one option could be a standalone OSM browser 
(based on JOSM???) which downloads the data, renders it then uploads it to 
a central server.

Comments?

Nick